Becoming Dust Poem by Karen Thornburg

Relationships require that your heart have amnesia to all the other wonderful experiences that have gone into making you who you have become.

You are not to forget all the lessons learned, but forget about the fires that burned to forge the steel. The steel that in all of its beauty becomes a prison.

Forced to swallow the keys to memories that are trapped deep inside your being.

A plant can't grow when you cut off its roots. Yet when you leave a relationship the leaves fall in unison all racing to cover the ground you are now forbidden to walk upon even in your dreams.

You are ripped from the soil and slammed into new surroundings. Missing your roots, and praying you can still grow.

Yet when our pots can no longer contain all the beauty we have become, when parts of us withers and dies.

When our own tears become the only moisture to reach our roots. We are expected to cut out the beautiful with the withered. Toss out the good with the contaminated. To be transplanted into an ever smaller pot.

Parts of our soil and roots being discarded with each failed relationship until our hearts become agoraphobic. Our leaves wither, we can no longer bloom and we no longer desire the sunlight, the soil or the rain.

We die, and we wither away into the dust that settles on anything that looks stable.

We settle into a life we never imagined or wanted. The beauty that was our leaves and our blooms are just a distant memory kept from us by swallowed keys.

We become the soil that someone else dares not walk on even in their dreams. Our hearts have amnesia and refuse to remember the good as well as the pain and we no longer know who we are.

We are just dust.

Karen Thornburg
9/12/2020